1. Field
Various features disclosed herein pertain generally to wireless communication systems, and at least some features pertain to devices and methods for facilitating distributed channel access for transmissions from a plurality of access terminals in a wireless communication system.
2. Background
Access terminals, such as laptop computers, personal digital assistant devices, mobile or cellular phones, personal media players, or any other device with a processor, that communicate with other devices through wireless signals are becoming increasingly popular and are used more frequently. Such increases in distribution and use of access terminals have resulted in the need for greater bandwidth. In order to address the issue of increasing bandwidth requirements, different schemes are being developed to allow multiple access terminals to communicate by sharing channel resources while achieving high data throughputs.
Multiple Input or Multiple Output (MIMO) technology represents one such approach that has emerged as a popular technique for the next generation communication systems. MIMO technology has been adopted in several emerging wireless communications standards such as the Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 standard. IEEE 802.11 denotes a set of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) air interface standards developed by the IEEE 802.11 committee for short-range communications (e.g., tens of meters to a few hundred meters).
Spatial Division Multiple Access (SDMA) is a multiple access scheme which enables multiple streams transmitted to different receivers at the same time to share the same frequency channel and, as a result, provide higher user capacity. SDMA is a common and typical MIMO scheme in cellular wireless systems.
Although, MIMO technologies, such as SDMA are effective in allowing multiple access terminals to communicate by sharing channel resources, there remains a need for a solution to facilitate distributed transmissions among a plurality of access terminals during a transmission opportunity.